We desire that everyone who walks through the doors of Seed Church will experience true freedom.
In general, we in America are pretty big fans of freedom. The question becomes, though, what is freedom, and in what context? It clearly doesn’t mean that we are at liberty to do whatever we want whenever we want. More importantly for our purposes here, what is spiritual freedom?
In Romans, Paul addresses this, and ends up describing how, in order to be free, we must serve the right master.
Paul wrote Romans in the mid-50s in the 1st century to the Roman church which was a blending of Jews and gentiles. There was tension between those groups, and Paul largely wrote the letter to address those tensions and
In chapter 6, Paul asserts that all people serve some master. “You are slaves to anyone you obey.”
In the movie “The Master” Philip Seymour Hoffman’s character, a thinly veiled L Ron Hubbard, says “If you figure out a way to live without a master, any master, be sure to let the rest of us know, for you would be the first in the history of the world.”
So everyone in the church, Jew and gentile alike, were faced with this choice of who they would serve. The default is serving sin – “all have sinned,” writes Paul, regardless of which group they are in, and all must reap what they have sown.
But Paul also writes that we are offered another master, a master in whose service we find true freedom. When we enter the service of Christ we are justified in the sight of God and the process of sanctification begins. It is through these twinned processes that we find freedom.
We find freedom from the idols in our culture: comfort, pleasure, success, sex, status, politics, power. Striving after these things drives anxiety and depression, even in a society that is, by any measure, the most free, the wealthiest and the most successful in any time period in human history. Even poor Americans live better than the Pharoahs of ancient Egypt – arguably even better than the millionaires of the 19th century. And yet we still do not feel free.
If we seek after the freedom offered by the world, we will slowly poison ourselves (and sometimes not do slowly). The irony is that to be truly free, we must become a slave.
We don’t like that notion. Especially in our individualistic American culture, we hate that notion of overtly giving over our will. We would prefer to live in rebellion and denial, and accept the silent mastery of sin over the vocal mastery of Christ.
Others have a hard time accepting the freedom Christ offers because they feel the weight of the guilt and shame that come with the mastery of sin.
Many others don’t even see the freedom or the slavery, because we are distracted. Phones, social media, entertainment, drugs, food, travel – they can all stick our time away and make us completely blind to the fact that we are enslaved.
But as Bob Dylan sings,
But you’re gonna have to serve somebody, yes
Indeed you’re gonna have to serve somebody
Well, it may be the devil or it may be the Lord
But you’re gonna have to serve somebody
The only hope for freedom is to surrender to Christ. The only way to truly live is to die with Christ. The only way to be who we are meant to be is to lose ourselves entirely.
What decisions do you need to make in order to experience freedom? What boundaries do you need to put up in order to experience freedom? What do you need to lay down in order to take up the gifts God offers?
– Sermon Notes, Dave Lester, Seed Church, Lynnwood, WA, January 12, 2020